The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
The following detailed description is made with reference to the technology disclosed. Preferred implementations are described to illustrate the technology disclosed, not to limit its scope, which is defined by the claims. Those of ordinary skill in the art will recognize a variety of equivalent variations on the description.
Existing approaches for securing data (such as customer data) stored in a storage area (e.g., database, data stores, etc.) may be based on asymmetric or symmetric cryptography. With asymmetric cryptography, a pair of keys—a public key and a private key—is used. The customer data can be encrypted using the public key and decrypted using the corresponding private key. Typically it is very slow to encrypt data using public key of asymmetric key pair. Instead an acceptable practice is to encrypt data using a symmetric key. The symmetric key itself is encrypted with the public key thereby overcoming performance problems of asymmetric key cryptography.